The Next 6 Albums,
for My Top 12 Albums of 1968
Note: Some of this commentary is adapted from that in No Hype No Trends Music’s 200 Best Albums of the 1960s.
As always, you can jump to the playlist at the bottom of each post to listen while you read.
Within each tier (Top 6, Next 6, etc.), all albums are listed roughly chronologically (all release dates from Wikipedia, unless otherwise noted).
Aretha Franklin
Lady Soul
Aretha FranklinReleased 1968/01/22
With Lady Soul, Aretha Franklin builds upon the successes of with I Never Loved a Man… to release back-to-back soul powerhouses. Those two albums represent the peak of her career, and are the place to start for those unfamiliar with the Queen of Soul. Both are terrific.
Listen to more Aretha Franklin.
Read more in my top 100 of the decade.
Notable Critical Mentions:
- Acclaimed Music top albums of the ’60s, No. 033
- 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2005)
- SPIN: 25 Greatest Albums of All Time (1989), No . 013
- The Rolling Stone 200 Essential Record Collection (1997)
- Rolling Stone: 100 Best Albums of the Past 20 Years (1987), No . 048
- Rolling Stone 100 Best Albums of All Time (1997), No . 097
- Rolling Stone: 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2003), No . 084
- Uncut 200 Greatest Albums of All Time (2016), No . 152
- Paste 60 Best Albums of the 1960s, No . 042
Big Brother and The Holding Company
Cheap Thrills
Big Brother and The Holding CompanyReleased 1968/08/12
Other than the classic hit “Piece of my Heart,” Cheap Thrills mostly eschews catchy melodies and hooks—the band’s gritty, furious blues rock has an unyielding, grind-it-out power. Although only one of the songs was actually recorded live, the entire album has an untamed feel, as if it were recorded in a cave. The band feels at times a little muffled, to be honest, but the piercing cries of the guitar beautifully echo and float toward you as if from a distance, and when the ensemble hits hard, the sound is thunderous, pounding at you like a rain squall. But it’s the searing passion of Janis Joplin’s voice that just lifts you up and blows you away.
Listen to more Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company.
Read more in my top 50 of the decade.
Notable Critical Mentions:
- Acclaimed Music top albums of the ’60s, No. 053
- 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2005)
- Rolling Stone: 100 Best Albums of the Past 20 Years (1987), No . 050
- Rolling Stone: 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2003), No . 338
- NME Writers All-Time 100 (1974), No. 091
- Paste 60 Best Albums of the 1960s, No . 059
David Axelrod
Songs of Innocence
David AxelrodReleased 1968/10
I first heard of Axelrod with the release of his eponymous 2001 comeback album. The subsequent critical fanfare referenced the influence Axelrod had had on many contemporary artists, such as DJ Shadow. He’s a frequently sampled and referenced guy, apparently.
Axelrod’s first experiments came with the hijacking of the garage-rock band the Electric Prunes for Mass in F Minor and Release of an Oath. The Mass in F Minor has accumulated some critical cred (from SPIN magazine, among others), but it’s a bit of a failed mish-mash of Axelrod’s ideas and the contributions of the band, awkwardly contrasting Gregorian-style vocal chanting with psychedelic guitar freak-outs. Check it out, but don’t expect much from it. He jettisoned the band entirely for Release of an Oath, and the results are more cohesive, with vocals better integrated into the flow, and enabled him to embark on a sol career.
His debut Songs of Innocence is the best of his early albums, when he was first blending rhythmic orchestration into an instrumental pop framework. These are great orchestral pieces with pulsing beats and eerie dissonant string sustains, thirty years ahead of their time. I can’t imagine what people must have thought of this stuff back then, but to me now it sounds just great.
Read more in my top 100 of the decade.
Notable Critical Mentions:
Bonzo Dog Band
The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse
Bonzo Dog BandReleased 1968/11
I knew nothing of this bizarre comedy/music act before this project, and it’s easy to see why: no classic rock radio station would ever get within 10-foot-pole striking range of it. If the Bonzo Dog Band sounds like something straight out of a Monty Python skit, there’s good reason for that; these guys were Python contemporaries and collaborators. They’re cut from the same silly cloth, and the world of music is all the better for it. It’s great, quirky stuff.
The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse, their second album, adds a rock edge to their earlier music hall / vaudeville / jazz sound. It’s worth the price for “My Pink Half of the Drainpipe” alone, which humorously skewers bourgeois British pettiness. Other songs tell of disastrous love affairs with aliens and position 72 of the Kama Sutra, or poke fun at dance routines, hedge trimming, and being normal. “Hello Mabel,” ostensibly a pleasant love ditty in a McCartney-esque neo-jazz oldie style, comes with the standard people-stare-when-we-walk-side-by-side-down-the-street tropes. It seems sweet and innocent, only I can’t help but suspect it’s being sung to a farm animal.
But I can hear the criticisms now: How can this guy rate what is essentially a novelty act above something as serious and important as The Band? I hear your grief, and on some level can understand it. But the fact remains that this album has moments that fill me with glee and make me want to listen to them over and over again. The Band has moments that I like a lot. That’s it.
Listen to more Bonzo Dog Band.
Read more in my top 100 of the decade.
Notable Critical Mentions:
- Acclaimed Music, bubbling under the top 3000 albums of all time
The Monkees
Head
The MonkeesReleased 1968/12/01
Who knew? Yes, the Monkees were manufactured product—but they were a damned good one. And the band members had artistic aspirations beyond the commercial goals of their management.
Head boasts some great songs interspersed with sound collages every bit as interesting as “Revolution #9” and more skillfully woven into the patchwork of the surrounding songs. (Indeed, this album serves as a nice companion piece to the White Album, released less than two weeks beforehand.) It’s as if the Monkees applied the experimentation of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage recording as a means of stitching together the songs of the album.
There may have been a time when such splices of chatter and “found” recordings interspersed between and within songs seemed gratuitous, but by now the practice has become an essential thread of the fabric of recorded music. And that makes the Monkees pioneers.
I feel compelled to add that there’s some hypocrisy behind the Monkees-as-product criticism. After all, almost all pop music acts before, say, 1964, were absolute music industry-controlled products, as were most Motown and other R&B acts throughout the ‘60s and beyond. But we don’t disregard them for it. Was rock music supposed to somehow be more authentic? And yes, the Monkees shamelessly aped the Beatles—as did plenty of other bands who didn’t receive nearly the same critical disdain.
Blame it on The Monkees TV show, I guess. Curiosity led me to sample some of the show on YouTube. By no means should you ever make that same mistake. Taken by themselves, their albums are as good or better than many other similar acts of the day.
Apparently there was a movie from which this album was adapted (or vice-versa), but I haven’t bothered to actually check it out. I tend to assume I’ll have a lower opinion of the music once I’ve seen the film (or music video). So I’m judging the album on its own, and I must say I like it!
Read more in my top 50 of the decade.
Notable Critical Mentions:
The Pretty Things
S.F. Sorrow
The Pretty ThingsReleased 1968/12
The Pretty Things’ earlier albums cackled with a blues-rock intensity that suggests they could whip the Stones in a stage dual any day. Unfortunately, they never had their big break, and never had the same success. But they did manage the foray into flower-power psychedelia far better than the Stones ever did. Not only is S.F. Sorrow one of the best examples of ‘60s British psychedelic music, it may be the first-ever concept album to tell a story from start to finish, six months ahead of The Who’s Tommy.
As with Tommy, the story itself isn’t overly noteworthy; but the songs here seem less concerned with forced storytelling and just come across as individual songs. (Indeed, most of the story itself was written in paragraph form and presented between the song lyrics in the liner notes; as the result, the songs themselves merely comment on the story emotionally; freed from the burden of completing the story, they stand better on their own.)
And like Tommy, it’s the music that makes the album great. Inventive and compelling, it never fails to engage and maintain the interest of its audience with captivating arrangements and catchy hook galore. Very good stuff.
Read more in my top 50 of the decade.
Notable Critical Mentions:
- Acclaimed Music top albums of the ’60s, No. 127
- 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2005)
Here’s the complete 1968: The Year in Review playlist for you—three tracks per album.
Enjoy!
Also check out the singles playlists from 1968!
More 1968, The Year in Review
More Years in Review of the 1960s…
Cover Art Citations:
- Cheap Thrills: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2378462
- Head: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4259039
- S.F. Sorrow: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12974017
- Lady Soul: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=197091
- Songs of Innocence: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2554907
- The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5838894
Recent Comments